Russia and Germany at Odds Over Treasures : Art: When Russia unveiled the works seized from Germany during World War II, it again raised the issue of who should own the collection.

They had been stored in wooden crates marked osoby inventar --”special inventory.” But the Van Gogh, Degas and Gauguin masterpieces the Hermitage Museum brought out of secret storage and showed publicly Thursday for the first time are more than a stunning treasure revealed. Part of a vast hoard of valuables looted from private German collections by Red Army soldiers nearly 50 years ago, the paintings are at the heart of Russia’s emotional battle to close the book on World War II.

The canvases--Edgar Degas’ “Place de la Concorde,” Vincent van Gogh’s “La Maison blanche” (painted one month before his suicide) and Paul Gauguin’s “Piti Teina”--are from the Hermitage’s upcoming exhibition of 74 long-unseen Impressionist and Post-Impressionist jewels. Though “Hidden Treasures Revealed” does not open until March 30, it is already stirring the historical mists that keep the war experience alive in Russia’s national consciousness.

The collection--a complete list of which was made public for the first time Thursday--includes 15 Renoirs (including two long-lost portraits dated 1876, the year of the second Impressionist exhibition in Paris and Renoir’s most important period), six Monets and canvases by Picasso, Matisse and Corot. That is just the beginning. There are also, among others, Vuillards, Delacroix, a Matisse and seven Cezannes (including a self-portrait).

A volatile cocktail mixing spectacular art worth hundreds of millions of dollars with Russia’s need for historical justice, the exhibition spotlights the ongoing restitution feud with Germany--and Russia’s soulful struggle to make peace with its war history.

“I dislike the term trophy art --it’s crass,” Hermitage Museum director Mikhail Piotrovsky said in an interview. “We are a museum, not a court. And this will be an exhibition, not a trial. But there is one thing you must keep in mind. The Germans destroyed a lot of things, and our country cannot forget this.”

In a welter of contradictory and disingenuous statements Thursday, Russian and German officials delivered volleys of pointed remarks in the most revealing public exchange yet on the issue. Although Russian deputy cultural minister Mikhail Shvydkoi spoke of “cooperation,” he criticized the 1992 joint Russian-German statement of intent on restitution as “a document that raised expectations and put politics before art.”

The German consul here, Eberhard von Puttkamer, barely concealed his anger that the Hermitage clearly did not plan soon--if ever--to return the paintings. In a nimble speech, he said: “We are happy that this art is finally being shown. We do not think legal questions should be decided today. But I would like to express my hope that this exhibition will not become a hindrance to German-Russian relations.”

Piotrovsky has in the past skirted the issue that he is both Hermitage director and co-chairman of the bilateral restitution commission--a dual task that renders problematic his oft-repeated desire to see the exhibition “as a cultural event, not a political one.”

So while the Cold War is over, Germany and Russia are locked in a simmering feud over some of the world’s greatest art--a feud that “Hidden Treasures Revealed” is bringing to a boil.

At the heart of the dispute are not just the French canvases, but millions of artworks that Soviet and German armies pilfered from each other’s museums and private collections during the war. For their part, Hitler’s armies bombed three Baroque palaces outside St. Petersburg and destroyed Novgorod’s medieval frescoes. Hundreds of icons from churches and dozens of Chagall canvases from Belorussian collections vanished. Most notably, Nazi soldiers removed and lost forever the Amber Room--a luminous, amber-paneled chamber in the Catherine Palace that Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia gave to Peter the Great.

Soviet soldiers snatched the French canvases--which include Picasso’s “Absinthe (Girl in a Cafe),” Cezanne’s “Mont-Sainte-Victorie” and Matisse’s “Ballerina (La Danseuse)”--from the private collections of the Gerstenberg-Sharf, Krebs, Koenig and other families in Berlin. While Piotrovsky said he had invited the Gerstenberg-Sharf descendants to the opening, he brushed aside lawsuits filed by many of the heirs in German courts. “The family still collects art, and they remember these paintings,” he said, adding, “the Hermitage’s task is to show that we are a museum, and the court claims concern not us, but governments.”

The Red Army also looted the Schliemann gold (a trove from ancient Troy, now in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow), vast libraries (including medieval manuscripts and a Gutenberg Bible) and a collection of more than 300 drawings by Van Gogh, Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt. Some German pieces made their way to private hands.

In all, the two countries pilfered from each other an estimated 5 million artworks. But while Germany has hinted in the past at a broad trade, Russia has been hesitant to equate the losses it suffered with Germany’s.

“These aren’t parallel processes,” said Piotrovsky, whose restitution commission is due to meet this summer. “Russia lost a colossal, irreplaceable part of her heritage, but the Germans deliberately destroyed things. Sure, some things got lost or misplaced--by the way, we were guilty of carelessness too--but that’s not the same as destroying symbols of our national culture. The German pieces are at least still in existence.”

So the question that hung heavy Thursday in the Hermitage’s elegant theater was, why exhibit now?

“We are returning cultural valuables to the people, to those who will view the exhibit,” said Piotrovsky, who on Kremlin orders long denied the collection’s existence, but said Thursday it “had never been a secret.” “This exhibition is the first step on the path to deciding the important question of restitution. Art belongs to the people, and this is first and foremost a cultural event.” (The exhibition, which will run through Oct. 29, will not travel, according to the museum director.)

That very Russian brand of rhetoric sets the Germans, who have pushed for frankness and clarity, on edge. “We have never tried to keep secret what we have,” said German consul Von Puttkamer, “and have long acknowledged that some Russian pieces were taken in clear violation of international law.” (He also claimed that American soldiers marching triumphantly into Berlin had confiscated on U.S. government orders several million Russian artworks snatched by the Nazis from Russian soil. They were returned to Germany in 1948.)

As any Russian will tell you, the mechanics of law--Western or otherwise--mean little in a country with a 1,000-year tradition of political chaos. But even more salient in Russia is the continuing sense of passion as a force above the law. Russia overflows with documents and patchwork legislation, but it obeys the rhythms of its muddled soul.

Most Russians in St. Petersburg, a city nearly strangled by the 900-day Nazi-imposed blockade, consider the German treasures hard-won compensation and the rightful spoils of war--especially for the Hermitage, a world-class museum whose annual $500,000 acquisitions budget keeps it from buying at international auctions.

The Hermitage, Russia’s former home to the czars, already has a tradition of keeping the spoils of war. A portion of its 3 million objects (reportedly the world’s largest museum collection) was confiscated from Russian nobles by Bolshevik revolutionaries waging a civil war to give art to “the people.” When the museum in 1958 gave Communist East Germany 800,000 pieces looted from Berlin and Bremen museums, including Egyptian artifacts and medieval manuscripts, it was viewed as more symbolic than substantial.

Taking St. Petersburg’s cue, the Pushkin Museum will unveil the Schliemann gold in 1996. But as a traumatized post-Soviet Russia approaches the 50th anniversary of what it calls “the Great Patriotic War,” few believe in the possibility of a peace in Russia’s museum vaults.

The Hermitage now contains an estimated 2,000 German works. Even the restitution commission, which is making an inventory of each side’s losses, does not yet have a complete listing. But in the eyes of a country with a fiercely proud and enigmatic soul--a soul that wants a moral account, not a paper document--that may not matter.

“But I do see one possible solution to this problem,” Piotrovsky concluded. “Germany could, in a goodwill gesture in memory of the war, leave at least a part of what is already here. I hope people will see this as magnificent art. But we must not forget what Russia lost.”